In erasure poetry, an original text is blacked out to create, or reveal, a different story embedded inside it. Whether the initial author intended this second message is irrelevant; the fact that some later poet could erase it into being is all the authority these writers need to argue that the uncovered piece was there all along. In this way, erasure poetry is much like queer history, a discipline that revolves around reading against the archive — mining biased sources for neutral facts, reading meaning into what isn’t said as much as what is, and flensing useful details off a rotten mass of lies.
In Justin Torres’s lyrical new novel, “Blackouts,” these two forms — erasure poetry and queer history — collide to create one epic conversation between a pivotal 20th-century queer sexology text and two unreliable queer Puerto Rican narrators (or perhaps three, depending how you read the genre-bending conclusion).
“Blackouts” opens with the book’s younger narrator (who is unnamed but affectionately referred to as “nene”) arriving at a mysterious institution called “the Palace,” in search of Juan Gay, an elderly queer man he had briefly met a decade before, when they were held in the same mental hospital. Juan is dying, and he hopes that nene will “finish the project that had once consumed him, the story of a certain woman who shared his last name. Miss Jan Gay.” With this burden comes a bequest, an inheritance of sorts: a two-volume, 1941 sexology study entitled “Sex Variants.” Juan’s copy, which he now gives to nene, has been largely erased to create poetry from its pathologized portraits of anonymous gay research subjects.
The title “Blackouts” refers both to this poetry (presented in photos between chapters) and to fugues nene has been suffering, which cause him to experience gaps in his consciousness. Understanding these episodes is the reason nene sets out to find Juan, the only person he’s ever met who seems like him in a fundamental way.
Nene moves into the Palace, and the pair begin a Scheherazade-esque dialogue, through which we come to learn that Jan Gay was, for a while, Juan’s guardian — and also the primary force behind the writing of “Sex Variants,” though in the end her work was stolen and published without giving her proper credit. Nene realizes that Juan hopes he will take these stories (Jan’s and Juan’s), meld them with his own and pass them on, becoming the latest link in a chain of oral history that stretches from queer to queer across continents and centuries. This, of course, is the only way to truly cheat death, the solution the real Scheherazade found (if she existed): to become an everlasting story.
The further into the novel you go, the less “real” everything outside Juan’s and nene’s stories seems. It is impossible to tell if “the Palace” is a sad charity hospice for dying homosexuals, for instance, or some kind of queer bardo for gay ghosts. The supreme pleasure of the book is its slow obliteration of any firm idea of reality — a perfect metaphor for the delirious disorientation that comes with learning queer history as an adult.
Over and over again, “Blackouts” highlights what has been lost, forgotten or obscured, without finding, remembering or demystifying it in the process. As a queer historian, I’m all for highlighting our obscured past, but Torres is using a more subtle blade here, attempting to chronicle the experience of not knowing, in both literal and metaphorical ways. Torres layers erasure upon erasure: Juan passes on quotes (whose source he can’t remember), calling forth people of color who are so often still forgotten when queer history is “recovered” by white scholars, and in doing so, he is introducing nene, whose own memory is like a cracked pot leaking, to a midcentury queer world that no longer exists. These erasures — and nene’s inheritance of and grappling with them — are the point. It is difficult to make a whole from a hole, but in Torres’s hands, we feel the weight of nothingness and the presence of absence.
Although it is marketed as a novel, “Blackouts” is not easily categorizable as fiction or nonfiction. Because “Sex Variants” was, indeed, a real study. Jan Gay was real too, and her research really was stolen by powerful men, who published it as their own. Readers familiar with Torres’s biography will also notice that nene bears a considerable resemblance to the author himself, and the final pages of the book play with the question of whether Juan was a real person or if he is just a fictional character.
It’s as though the magician has stepped forward at the end of the show to explain the trick, and disappeared himself in the process. Torres haunts this book full of ghosts like a ghost himself, and with this novel, he has passed the haunting on, creating the next link in a queer chain from Jan to Juan to nene to you.